We left off the saga of the EPA chlorpyrifos ban with our late August post, Letter: MN lawmakers ask state ag commissioner Petersen to suspend chlorpyrifos registration.
Petersen has acted on the letter.
At the Star Tribune, Greg Stanley reports in Ban on common insecticide will force Minnesota soybean farmers to find alternatives:
. . . Nobody can say exactly why, but soybean aphids have thrived in Minnesota even as their populations have fallen or crashed in other parts of the Midwest. They were first detected in the state in the early 2000s, said Robert Koch, entomologist with the University of Minnesota.
Over the years, they largely died off in places like Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan, Koch said. But in Minnesota the tiny green pests kept coming back, and as farmers sprayed for them, they started building up resistance to certain poisons.
Chlorpyrifos was one of the few tools that would consistently kill them, Koch said.
"There are still some chemicals that work, but that box is getting smaller," he said. . . .
The Obama administration started the process of taking chlorpyrifos off the market, citing risks to children, drinking water and wildlife. But the EPA reversed that decision shortly after President Donald Trump took office in 2017.
That reversal was challenged, and in April, a federal appeals court ordered the government to determine whether the pesticide is safe. In August, the EPA ruled that the pesticide did, in fact, pose a risk to children and farmworkers and announced the ban, which will go into effect Feb. 22.
Shortly after it was announced, Rep. Rick Hansen, DFL-South St. Paul, and several state lawmakers called on the Minnesota Department of Agriculture to immediately suspend sales of chlorpyrifos to close the window during which it could still be applied.
"If we know it's a bad chemical, why continue to sell it?" Hansen said.
On Monday, state Agriculture Commissioner Thom Petersen wrote in a letter to lawmakers that the agency will not allow the chemical to be used on Minnesota crops starting Jan. 1.
It would be rare and unlikely for any growers to apply chlorpyrifos this late in the season, Petersen said.
"We'd like the ban to happen sooner, but we're glad the agency has taken these concerns into account and is standing up to the agrochemical interests that are used to getting their way," Hansen said.
The chemical will still be allowed for a handful of uses, including at tree nurseries, golf courses and sod farms.
It's unlikely the ban will cause Minnesota soybean fields to go out of production or force farmers to change their crops, said Bill Gordon, a farmer in Worthington and chair of the American Soybean Association.
But it may actually increase the amount of insecticide used in Minnesota, he said, because growers will likely have to reapply less effective insecticides multiple times each season since soybean aphids have grown resistant to them.
"So instead of having just one pass that kills all the butterflies, bees, pollinators and beneficial insects in the field, you have to come back in two weeks and do it again," Gordon said. "So now you don't really have a chance to build that beneficial population back up. It just negates some of the things they're trying to do with this ban."
More applications also mean more costs borne by the farmers.
We hope one tool is the removal of the invasive species buckthorn, a nasty plant that serves as a winter haven for the aphids.
Related posts:
- Letter: MN lawmakers ask state ag commissioner Petersen to suspend chlorpyrifos registration
- EPA to block use of chlorpyrifos on food crops; pesticide tied to neurological harm in children
- Annals of regulatory capture: read these Intercept articles on pesticide makers & the EPA
- Session Daily: Pesticide scrutinized for affecting child brain development could be banned
- Session Daily: 'Problem-solving' omnibuzz environment bill passed by House
- Buzz briefs: Bee Lucky lottery tickets; Lawns to Legumes wins Environmental Initative award.
- House enviro omnibus bill centers "the people, & the land, & the water & the wildlife of MN"
- Pollinator protection bills heard today in the Minnesota House Agriculture Committee at 1PM
- MN House Republicans abjectly fail to protect pesticides from radical pollinator-hugging leftists
- Update: MNHouse GOP fails to replace pesticide industry interests over local control
- MN mom spoke out in DC on behalf of bill banning chlorpyrifos, a brain-harming pesticide (2017)
Image: Graphic from The Most Widely Used Pesticide, One Year Later, in Harvard University's SITN's Science Policy blog.
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